A Christmas Castle In Scotland (Romantic Escapes #9) by Julie Caplin

Book Review Jan 05, 2024

My review

4/5 stars

My Mum has been raving about Julie Caplin books for a while now, so when I saw this one on the festive reading shelf at my local library, I decided to finally give her a go. I can see why my Mum enjoys her writing so much.

This book was everything you want a Christmas book to be - warm, cosy, gentle, atmospheric; it gave me all the festive feels and I enjoyed reading it immensely. This was aided along hugely by the fact that Izzy was so focused on food - I find food featuring prominently always makes a book feel more cosy and comforting. It all felt accessible though - while Izzy had been a cookery course, she was still cooking every day food with love and care, rather than aiming for Michelin-star food.

The setting was ideal - a castle at Christmas, what could be better. The author did a good job of making everything feel festive, with talk of cutting down trees in the forest, Christmas shopping in Edinburgh and kitting the castle out for Christmas guests.

The romance element was sweetly handled, but never felt like the main plot-point for me; I don't know if that was intentional or not. Ross was a decent male lead, but I didn't feel particularly drawn to him. I actually found myself more interested in how the relationship between Izzy and her mother, Xanthe, played out.

I also could have done with a little more intrigue. A couple of side-plots were introduced at various points in the story, that I thought were going to add a sliver of drama to the book and give us a bit of a mystery to solve. The mystery never materialised, they turned out to be completely harmless, innocuous side-stories, and I found myself a little disappointed by that.

All in all, it was a lovely book to help get me in the festive mood, and I would be interested in reading more by the author.

Book blurb

Izzy McBride had never in a million years expected to inherit an actual castle from her great uncle Bill but here she was, in the run up to Christmas, Monarch of her own Glen – a very rundown glen in need of a lot of TLC if her dream of turning it into a boutique bed and breakfast was to come true.

But when Izzy’s eccentric mother rents a room to enigmatic thriller author Ross Adair and the Scottish snow starts to settle like the frosting on a Christmas cake, it’s a race to get the castle ready before they’re all snowed in for the holidays.